A Walk in the Woods, or a Poetics of Exile: Robert Bringhurst's "The Lyell Island Variations".

Abstract

Written in response to various poets writing in different languages, “The Lyell Island Variations” is one of the most ambitious poem sequences in Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst’s entire literary corpus. The sequence consists of nine poems that constitute, in the poet’s words, “an album of mere mistranslations,” brought together under the name of an island in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the coast of Alaska and British Columbia and home to the Haida, one of the native peoples of North America. The translations pay homage to a number of pre-eminent poets from several literary traditions, as the use of textual thresholds in different languages found in the epigraphs preceding each single poem makes clear. This article explores how, in “The Lyell Island Variations,” the poet is trying to rescue remnants of visions and tattered fragments of wisdom from voices speaking different human languages, while making a relevant contribution to literary tradition.